Daily Archives: 4/7/2008

I’m not ready to go into another challenge just yet, so I’ll just be chilling this month and working on getting into a maintenance groove. After the TT challenge (still need to take pics, but my digicam decided to die on me last week) and office competition (which my team won, by the way!), I am in need of a breather. The last month has been more stressful than it should have been because I was having some minor freakouts about the two challenges, and I am flat out tired of feeling that kind of self-inflicted pressure. I was becoming neurotic AND rebellious at the same time towards the end, which is not fun.

I don’t want to do anything more OCD related to fitness and nutrition than lifting 3x/week, doing cardio/intervals 3x/week, and eating tasty, healthier meals that don’t all have to be 100% clean.

As far as workouts go, I’m moving away from Turbulence Training for the rest of the year and using The New Rules of Lifting for Women and workouts from Jason Ferruggia through December. The weather is starting to change for the worse for inline skating (too hot, too muggy, too much rain that makes the roads slick in the mornings when I normally work out), so I’ll also have to find another form of cardio that I enjoy to supplement my usual treadmill running. DH and I don’t start swimming until June.

Nutrition-wise…I’m going to give the plan from NROLFW a try and also attempt to rediscover my love of cooking yummy stuff by trying out one new recipe a week from my collection of various healthy eats cookbooks.

In other news, I finished my raised bed square foot veggie garden this weekend by filling it with 14 cu. ft. of quality organic top soil and another cubic foot of composted cow doings. Hurray for dirt! So far I’ve planted 40 squares total of veggies, including tomatoes, bell peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, pak choy, sugar snap peas, chives, and Swiss chard plus the sweet potato patch behind the main vegetable garden. I also plugged in 18 marigold transplants around the veggie bed and in other parts of the garden for some color and moved about 2 dozen seedlings I had started on 2/28 outside to bigger flats.

Then I went inside and used Xara Xtreme (a vector drawing package similar to Illustrator) to make totally obsessive compulsive Spring, Summer, and Fall/Winter layouts for my veggie patch showing what would be planted at what time, complete with color coding. I also drafted up a layout of the south garden/sweet potato area with a long black Bezier curve to show where I’d buried the soaker hose. Talk about the best of two worlds–I got to make some brilliantly nitpicky diagrams AND teach myself how to use a new software package–whee! I capped off my weekend gardening binge by printing out the above and about 30 pages of Florida gardening publications from the local extension office.

The de-cluttering effort is continuing as well. So far the living room, dining room, pantry, hall closet, handbag/purse collection, and bedroom have been done. Clearing out all of the old papers, receipts, expired coupons, hair pins, Lactaid wrappers, and other random odds and ends that have accumulated in the 4-5 bags between I regularly rotate took forever. I felt wonderfully organized and light afterwards, though. Next I will tackle the kitchen cabinets (eek) and the home office/craft room (eeeeeeeeeeeek!).

And finally, Friday night Chris and I met up with some friends at Rising Star, the live band karaoke club at Universal Citywalk that I mentioned a few weeks ago. It was the final night of their Top 10 Karaoke Challenge where the 10 best performers who filled out entry forms over the 4 nights of competition would win 2-park annual passes to Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure and get to perform at the official VIP grand opening party for the club on April 11. I figured that I might as well enter since I was there (and the entry form was mercifully short) and belted out Bryan Adams’s Summer of 69 and Pat Benatar’s Hit Me With Your Best Shot. (Yes, again–not my fault. One of the judges asked me to do it after the Bryan Adams song.)

This afternoon I got a call from a Universal rep telling me that I’d made it into the top 10 (Free annual pass! Yay!) and would get to sing at the media/VIP party this Friday. W00t!

The best part of the whole thing was getting verbal kudos from the band members themselves after I sang. They have to play these songs 5 nights a week for 45 singers each night, so when the guitarist, bass player, and backup singers tell you that you totally rocked a song, it’s pretty darn awesome.

I tell you, it’s a good thing that I didn’t discover my inner rock star when I was younger or I would have flunked out of high school and shamed my parents for eternity.